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Is classical education a formula? Just mix Latin, reading the great books, inspire a little wonder and boom– just like that you have a perfectly educated student? Not exactly. It’s a little more nuanced than that.

In this episode, we are diving into education from all angles with the Veritas Press head of curriculum development, Michael Eatmon. If you’re trying to figure out what really matters in education that results in well-educated adults, you won’t want to miss this episode of Veritas Vox!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Welcome to Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. I'm Marlin Detweiler. As you have probably figured out by now, if you haven't, I'm going to tell you. Sometimes I interview people. Sometimes Laurie, my wife, interviews people, and sometimes we both interview people.

Today is one of the days that she and I will be working together to interview Michael Eatmon. One of our reasons for doing that is because we both have very extensive working relationships with him and know how to pick and prod at him in ways that neither of us has a complete monopoly on. Michael, welcome. We are so glad to have you!

And as a point of introducing Michael, early on in his connection to classical Christian education; the first role he assumed was the head teacher, the lead teacher at the Geneva School in Orlando, Florida, a school that Laurie and I began in 1992. Michael was the first person that we hired, and we developed a remarkable relationship with him.

And that continues now as he serves at Veritas as the Director of Curriculum Development. Michael, maybe you can unpack a little bit what that title means. I certainly could do it, too, but frankly, I'll bet you could do it better than me.

Michael Eatmon:

I'm not sure whether that's the case, but I’ll unpack it a bit. So, yes, I'm the Director of Curriculum Development, and under the Vice President of Curriculum Development, Karl Petticoffer, I'm responsible to explore and oversee the development of publication projects from Veritas Press. Publication projects once upon a time meant ink on paper in bound books. Now it includes not only that but also such projects as the Phonics Museum. So education done in the 21st century.

Marlin Detweiler:

So when you say the Phonics Museum, you mean the app specifically?

Michael Eatmon:

Yes! Thank you for the clarification. So not only over the last ten years, but then looking into the future, I expect that what we mean by Veritas Press publications will continue to expand and develop. And what it looks like this year will look different from what it did ten years ago when I began.

Marlin Detweiler:

Laurie, I think you would agree with me when I say that Michael is the smartest person that I know. Maybe you can ask him some questions about that that would demonstrate to others why we say that.

Laurie Detweiler:

Well, I can tell you why I say that, because it used to be when my children had a question, I would say, “Let's call Michael,” now I do it when my grandchildren have a question because just the other day I called him– what was it, Michael? What word was it? She wanted to know why the plural Ava wanted to know why the plural was…?

Michael Eatmon:

I believe she was asking about fish.

Laurie Detweiler:

That's it! Fish. And. And wanting to know how to use this. I said, “Hold on. We're calling Michael. He'll have the answer!” And then, she wanted to know what other words that were that fit into this category of using the plurals without adding an s.

Michael Eatmon:

That’s right! Yes.

Laurie Detweiler:

He gave her a great explanation, I might add. But yes, he is the smartest person I know.

Marlin Detweiler:

Can you give us a little background on your educational background, help others understand where that idea may have come from?

Laurie Detweiler:

Like how many masters you have– a kajillion here?!

Michael Eatmon:

Well, in fact, I don't have a kajillion, but let me dial back just a little bit. So I attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, in the late nineties, where I studied classical and modern foreign language. So at the time, Furman didn't offer a degree in classical and modern foreign languages or comparative linguistics. But I studied as many classical and modern foreign languages as I could in those four years and really developed a passion for linguistics because, at the time, I thought I would be heading off into the military to serve in military intelligence, in language infiltration.

That didn't work out. God had other plans for me. God had marital plans for me, and he had seminary plans for me. And so soon after I was married in the summer of ‘91, I began grad school. Grad school brought me here to Central Florida, where I began Reformed Theological Seminary. So even though I have done most of the work for a Master of Divinity from RTS, I hold only a master of arts in theology.

And then after that, some years afterward, I decided to go back to school because I had been away from the classroom too much. And I pursued a Master of Liberal Studies, which is effectively a master in Omnibus at Rollins College. So that's my most recent program, and I'd have to say probably of the two, it might be the more interesting of the two programs.; I better park it there because that could be its home station on its own. Unless you want me to continue.

Marlin Detweiler:

Laurie, I am trying to get our dog not to be recorded. I'm going to go mute. If you could follow up with a couple of questions.

Laurie Detweiler:

Michael, tell us a little bit about how the language is like knowing all these languages and what that's done has helped this in your role in curriculum development. Because I know that it has, and I say that because a lot of parents look and say, “Why should my child study Latin and why should they learn all these languages?” And I've just seen what a difference it's made to how you view literature and just lots of other things.

Michael Eatmon:

Well, thank you for the question. Yeah. It seems that among linguists tend to find them in one of two camps. Either you find them in a kind of traditionalist camp that teaches that God delivered a given language, English or Latin or Greek or Spanish or whatever it was at a particular time in history to a particular people. And there it got frozen, never to develop.

And then there are those who in another camp would say, “No language is always an everywhere dynamic. What has gone before us doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters now is how we communicate today.” And I like to live in both camps because I think both camps have something significant to contribute.

On the one hand, I enjoy and promote the study of classical languages because I believe some of the best ideas that have ever been communicated were communicated in these ancient so-called dead languages.

I love what people call them “dead languages.” They're not dead. They are immortal. They have never died. So these languages, like Greek and Latin, and Hebrew, they expressed some of the greatest ideas that mankind has ever expressed. And so it would be a real cultural and, I think, personal deficit for us not to do our best to hear those original ideas communicated in their original tongues.

On the other hand, we live in the 21st century, and not everyone has access to these classical languages. Not everyone, for whatever reason, wants to have access to these classical languages. And so I think it's important for us to do what we can to transfer these permanent things of the true, the good, and the beautiful that are embedded even in some of these ancient languages. Recontextualize it and translate it for modern audiences. And that has a real impact even on how I develop curriculum.

So when I write, I write as if I'm writing for a 21st-century audience right now. The reason I do is well, because I am writing for a 21st-century audience, and there is a way, I believe, to recapture some of the beauty of the past, the truth, and the goodness embedded in the past in the cultural tradition that we've inherited. There's a way to capture it, contextualize it, and then translate it, even for a modern audience that never has and maybe never will study Greek or Latin or even.

Marlin Detweiler:

Michael, let me follow up on that for a minute. One of the things that is true of you, it's not true of many people that will be listening, and many people that have come to enjoy the idea of classical Christian education for their children and grandchildren is that you've come to an interest in the movement, the topic, the idea of the pedagogy from a different perspective. Tell us how you came to an interest in classical Christian education and why it leads us down the same road together.

Michael Eatmon:

Thank you. That is a great question. And it's another question, the answer to which puts us all three in the same realm. And that is I learned about classical Christian education from you two back in the early nineties. I believe at the time, I was serving as a teaching assistant to R.C. Sproul at RCS, and one of the three of you, I don't recall which one exactly, but one of the three of you asked me if I would consider reading a book. That book, of course, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning.

Marlin Detweiler:

I believe that was R.C.

Laurie Detweiler:

It had to have been R.C.

Michael Eatmon:

I believe it was, too. And he asked me if I wouldn't mind reading it and giving him some feedback. I did do that, but it took me a lot longer to get through that book than I had anticipated, largely because as I was reading, I had to stop every couple of pages and say, I have been robbed, even though I thought I had a good education prior to that point, I don't think I realized– I hadn't realized just how deficient that education had been.

So what that book did for me was to open a brand new vista, not in how to teach others. I wasn't thinking as a teacher yet. I was still thinking as a linguist. It opened up new vistas about my own education and what was lacking about it. And so I began a re-schooling of Michael in the early nineties, and I thought, “I have missed a great deal of the great tradition, ‘the great conversation’ as Mortimer Adler would call it, the great conversation that's gone before. I have only listened to and interacted with a smidgen of it. What can I do to start making up for lost time?”

And as I did, I dove into the classical educational tradition as deeply as I could. Thankfully, where I was serving at the time at the Geneva School, by this point, I was not a lead teacher but the academic dean, and part of my work at the Geneva School intentionally was for me to continue to research and develop classical education in the context of the Geneva School here in Central Florida.

And for me, that meant looking at the tip of the iceberg that was the Lost Tools of Learning, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, and the Lost Tools of Learning– the essay behind it. Viewing those as the tip of the iceberg and then starting to look beneath the surface. And as I did over the years, I came to see that the tradition of the liberal arts and sciences is far bigger, far broader, far deeper than three lost tools. And with all due respect to Sayers and Wilson, but far broader, far deeper, far richer, that it includes not only the Quadrivium, which we talk about sometimes with arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, but even I would argue and have argued over the years, even with some lost lost tools of learning, some pre lost tools of learning three tools that I tend to refer to as promusica, peripatesis, and gymnastica.

And three following tools that some do talk about and they are natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and theological philosophy, theology being the queen of the sciences. And so this whole gamut, the seven plus three on the front and three on the back for me, constituted a more full-orbed vision or, say, a medieval educator and or an Italian renaissance educator would have viewed what we refer to as classical education.

So for me, that education, the re-schooling of Michael began in the nineties, and here I am in a few years later, still re-schooling Michael.

Marlin Detweiler:

Laurie, what do you remember about those early years as Michael went through this metamorphosis, if you will?

Laurie Detweiler:

Him walking on a desk! No, what I can say is you always wonder what it takes to captivate children. I think the thing that Michael always did the best and inspired those around him was to cause children to be curious, to wonder. You know, there are many people, many educators that will tell you the biggest thing you want to try to do is not take that away from a child. No matter what age they are. Right? And so many times, I think we get caught up in getting the math lesson done and getting the history lesson done and getting the philosophy lesson done, whatever it might be that we forget that getting it done is not what we're there for. We're there to inspire them and to get them to learn.

And to me, I saw that in you as you educated children. I remember the day you hopped up on the desk, and it was they weren't paying attention. They were not– you didn't have them, and you knew what is it going to take for me to get them to have them? And that's what you did. And so I've always said Michael will do whatever it takes to get children to be inspired, to learn.

Michael Eatmon:

Well, thank you for that. Yeah! In recalling that incident, I also remember that I wasn't planning for anybody to walk into my room while.

Laurie Detweiler:

Probably not!

Michael Eatmon:

On the table. Yeah, but as it turns out, it all worked for the best. Interesting what you say, though, because, you know, sometimes in education proper, but in the Christian world, we talk about or at least traditional Christian conversation about ethics has talked about four cardinal and three theological virtues: wisdom, justice, moderation, courage, faith, hope and love, these seven.

And I always thought it important too to add three virtues, as it were, for the student. You know, the teacher might be thinking about prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and love. These are the sort of character traits that I want to embody. The student, I think, which describes all of us, not just the ones who are sitting in the chairs in front of us.

But I think the student seeks to embody three virtues too. And they are humility, wonder, and work. And it seems that some models of education really capitalize on the work, instilling a good work ethic in the kids, you know, in some cases, they shackle them and then require bricks without straw. But for me, what really captures the heart or mind, not simply external compliance, is wonder, right? Invoking that wonder, calling it forth, and then cultivating in that student the recognition that for however much we know, knowing here I am at 52. I know more than I did at 22, but only a smidgen more cultivating in students that virtue that says, no matter how much I know, what I don't know and what I don't understand dwarfs what I do.

And that, I believe, helps keep us as students, as teacher students in a posture of being at the same time, humble, in recognizing what we don't know, and also keeping our eyes open wide and our ears to in wonder, in curiosity, wanting to know more, asking questions not only of things that are familiar to us but more importantly of things that are not.

Laurie Detweiler:

And I think that's so important because as I look back over the years from when Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning was written many people accused me, you know, this of being, a closet Charlotte Mason person. And I would say there are many things that Charlotte Mason does extremely well. I would say it's not that I'm a closet Charlotte Mason person. What I am, though, is somebody that realizes that you can't just take what Sayers wrote and act as if this is the prescription for the way you do things. Because, one, she had a lot more in her head than she wrote. She was educated in a very different way.

But two, if all you do is have a child memorize something, for instance, in a grammar stage, I would say you're not going to have that awe and wonder. And I think in some senses, that's why memorization was taken out of schools because we did exactly what you were referring to. We gave them all of that without any of the all and wonder. And so we have to be very careful not to take what Sayers writes and think, “Well, all we're going to do in the grammar stage is have children memorize things, and then they're going to get to the dialectic stage, and they're going to learn logic. And then they're…” because that, in my mind, just is bad, as is if we hadn't begun this journey at all.

Michael Eatmon:

Right, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think some have that impression. You're right that if, if we can just sort of drum that work ethic into them in their younger years, then when they become dialectic students, all of a sudden, they'll be filled with awe, wonder and amazement and the delight of learning. No, by that point, oftentimes, we will have quenched the flame.

And it's interesting to something that you just brought up. And show me a side comment here. You said that for many who pursue Christian classical educational models, whether in the home or a brick and mortar institution or in an online environment, for many of them, they take Dorothy Sayers’ essay and or Doug Wilson's initial book, and they view it as a kind of formula. Just add water, and everything will come out predictably, as they say at the other end. And interestingly enough, I would say that what Dorothy Sayers describes in the lost tools of learning, in talking about learning the fundamental vocabulary and working mechanics of a given discipline in the grammar stage, there are many educational models, many versions of classical Christian education that stay, I think, in the pedagogical grammar stage.

Laurie Detweiler:

Very much so.

Michael Eatmon:

They never leave it. And here, I mean, as teachers, as administrators, as leaders of the school, they simply parrot back what other educators have said and or done without themselves entering into a dialectic exchange of ideas and then seeking out for how to adorn truth and goodness with beauty.

Laurie Detweiler:

I think that's true when you look at like Omnibus, the test and midterms and finals. I’ll have teachers say to me all the time, “How in the world do I grade this? This is so subjective. There's not a right answer,” to which I say, “No, there's not a right answer to that question. We're trying to see if the children have taken the materials..”

“But you're not even really asking them anything about the book.”

Oh, yes, we are. We're asking them to take the principles they learned in the book and now can you think about them? Right.

Marlin Detweiler:

We need to be mindful of time. And there are two questions I want to make sure you answer in this episode. In a subsequent episode, we're going to ask you some questions about the projects that you're currently working on and worked on most recently. But this has to do with the church.

How should the church relate to and be involved in education is the first question. I'll give you the second question also, because I think it easily combines. The second question is, how does the relation of worship styles affect educational initiatives? We have a lot of big mega-churches with seeker-sensitive worship that has an impact on the things that we're talking about.

Laurie Detweiler:

[Dog barking] Sorry, Mac just wants to talk. I guess he wants to be on this podcast!

Michael Eatmon:

My guess is he has strong opinions on that! Or she. So the first thing that I would say is that I believe you're right in implying in your question that something seems to have changed fairly recently in the way churches engage education –the question of education, not only biblical education in something like a traditional Sunday school or adult Christian education but even education more broadly, however that's defined.

And I believe you're right about that. I think for much of the last two millennia, the church has given, and by “the church”, I mean the church universal, has given a whole lot of thought to how to capture and communicate what it understands to be the treasury of what is true and good and beautiful in the Scriptures, in Christian culture, how to pass those down to the next generation.

If I remember correctly, it was G.K. Chesterton who once described education as one generation's breathing of its soul into the next. And in a significant way. I think the church, even long before Chesterton made that observation, I think the church understood that if we want to communicate our soul to the next generation, we need to educate that next generation.

Once upon a time, I think the churches saw that a primary step toward meeting that objective was not only to educate the children who were coming to their services every week but also to educate the parents. Right? Educating the parents not primarily in what to teach, although that was involved, certainly, but in why to teach, which is really interesting because, you know, we hear this kind of echoed in the Old Testament when the Passover was instituted. And we hear Moses even commenting to the children of Israel, saying to them, “By the way, we're going to start celebrating this annually. And when your kids are sitting around your table, and they ask you, why are we doing this? Then tell them.”And I think the church for most of the last two millennia, really adopted that approach to say, in order to breathe our soul, the soul of what we believe to be true, good, and beautiful, into the next generation, we need to educate the next generation.

If, however, if the church has begun to accommodate to the surrounding culture, though in such a way as to say, well, what's come before us really isn't all that important to us anymore. In some way. Christian history is bunk, you know, to borrow a term from Ford. If that's true, if what really matters is only the here and the now, if what really matters is my own experience, maybe the experience of my family members, whether our emotions are stirred up, and we feel good about God and others. If the past doesn't matter, only the present matters, the here and now, then there really is no driving force behind educating either the parents or the children. So long as they love Jesus, then the rest of it, it seems, is irrelevant. Now, the quick follow-up here would be to say…

Marlin Detweiler:

Micheal, let me interject here. I think for the sake of time, maybe to create some listener suspense, I'm going to ask you to hold the answer to the second question to the second episode. We're trying to manage a couple of things here, and I think that that will be the best way for us to do that. So thank you very much for that.

In our next episode, you'll continue talking about the answer to the Church's involvement in education and how it's affected by more modern education.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to Veritas Vox, the podcast that we have put together with the voice of classical Christian education. Look forward to having you with us again for the second episode with Michael Eatmon!